Paperback: Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by DT Max (Granta, £9.99)

On September 12, 2009, David Foster Wallace, the brilliant, eccentric, often depressed fiction writer, hanged himself. DT Max notes that all sorts of people were incredibly moved by his death and his book is engaging and tinged with sadness. Every detail about Foster Wallace’s life brings you closer to the inevitable self-annihilation you know is coming. We see a clever boy, and then a troubled adult, trying to cope with the up-and-down life of the writer. At Amherst College he studied unbelievably hard. He drank a mixture of coffee and tea and smoked a lot of dope. Later, he wrote like a man possessed. You’ll wish he wasn’t dead.